Category Archives: Reflections

Thoughts and musings along the way of this journey.

New Every Morning

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Remember my affliction and my wanderings,
the wormwood and the gall!
My soul continually remembers it
and is bowed down within me.
But this I call to mind,
and therefore I have hope:
The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
“The LORD is my portion,” says my soul,
“therefore I will hope in him.”
—Lamentations 3:19-24 ESV

Robin on branch

I woke up bright and early this morning after an early and melancholy night last night — feeling a world better, as the dawn light streamed in through my window, and the waking birds sang in the trees around me. And this verse echoed in my head. “His mercies are new every morning.”

This is an easy passage of Scripture to take out of context. I’ve so often heard it repeated in saccharine sentiment as a “feel good” message — but read the entire chapter from Lamentations, and you will find a graphic, painful, heart-wrenching description of God’s judgment on a sinner; on sinful, apostate Jerusalem. But even in the face of this suffering, this wasting away, the speaker turns to God in hope; and God gives His mercy to the sinner.

The LORD is good to those who wait for him,
to the soul who seeks him.
It is good that one should wait quietly
for the salvation of the LORD.
It is good for a man that he bear
the yoke in his youth.
Let him sit alone in silence
when it is laid on him;
let him put his mouth in the dust—
there may yet be hope;
let him give his cheek to the one who strikes,
and let him be filled with insults.
For the Lord will not
cast off forever,
but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion
according to the abundance of his steadfast love;
for he does not afflict from his heart
or grieve the children of men.
—Lamentations 3:25-33 ESV

God’s mercies are new every morning, for His children who turn away from their sin. God is not the “happy, feel-good” God portrayed by so much of evangelical Christian media. Neither is He the God of wrath anticipated by secular society. He is a God of just judgment; but above all He is a God of abundant love. Just as Jesus offered forgiveness “seventy times seven times” (Matthew 18:21-22), God’s mercies are new every morning, for every morning that we turn from our sin and toward Him.

Paternalism, Employer Healthcare, and the HHS Mandate

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Obama

President Barack Obama.

Now, I did not want to get into politics in this blog. This blog is about healing division, not fomenting it. But my friend has got me upset about the issue of this HHS contraception mandate — she liberal and not understanding the Catholic position, I standing the ground of my Church. I wanted to say a few words to clear the air.

Liberals like to paint this issue in terms of Catholic “misogyny” and “sexism” and “discrimination” against women. They like to make this an issue about sexual ethics, about the Catholic Church trying to dictate how women live their sexual and reproductive lives, painting the Church as a “bunch of misogynistic, white-haired old men” “obsessed with gynecology,” treading into areas that they do not understand and that are none of their business. But this is neither the position of the Church, nor an accurate representation of who stands behind it.

First, the bishops, the voice and leadership of the Church, happen to be men, but they do not stand alone. There are many women who fully support the Church’s stance on this issue. Second, the Catholic Church stands opposed to artificial contraception — but this has little to do with sexual ethics. Here in the South, many conservative people are opposed to sex education in schools, to free distribution of birth control to teens, and the like, because they perceive that it promotes and condones premarital sexuality. I think many people assume that the Catholic Church’s position on contraception is something like this — that the Church is opposed because it perceives that it promotes free and unprincipled sexuality. That may be a marginal reason why the Church is opposed, but not the core one at all. The core issue is the sanctity of life, and of the sanctity of sexuality within marriage. Artificial birth control removes the procreative aspect from sexuality. It eliminates the life-creating element from sexuality and from marriage. It distorts what God created sexuality and created marriage to be.

This is a teaching of the Catholic Church, for Catholics. And the Church does not offer or attempt to impose this teaching on secular society. The Church offers its teachings to those who will listen, and respects that many people won’t. But secular society is now attempting to impose its view, its teaching, on the Church. This is not about “white-haired old men” telling women how to live their lives — because the Church offers its teachings freely, not forcefully or restrictively, and recognizes that women have free will to make their own decisions and live their own lives. This is about men and women in the government telling the Church and its members that it is legally bound to violate its own beliefs and teachings.

The Church can’t, and doesn’t try to, and won’t, force women to stop using birth control. It won’t force its members to stop using birth control. Catholics and Catholic organizations won’t force their employees to stop using birth control. All the Church offers is its teachings against artificial contraception, and leaves the decision to the free will of women.

But now the government is demanding that Catholic organizations and Catholic employers pay for artificial contraception. Paying for it, funding it, is in fact, and inescapably, supporting it and condoning it. The government and liberals have made birth control into an “essential medical service,” something it has never been before. Even if it is medically necessary, Catholics are not trying to stop anybody from using it. They simply are unwilling to violate their consciences by funding it and supporting it. And they should not be forced to.

The very idea of employer health coverage — and of government healthcare regulation — is inherently paternalistic. It implies that an employer’s employees are his or her dependents, whose medical welfare he is obligated to support. It implies that a government’s citizens are its dependents, whose medical welfare it is obligated to mandate and ensure. The Catholic Church is also ostensibly paternalistic — concerned with the spiritual welfare of its members. But the Church’s paternalism does not impose its views on artificial birth control on either its members or employees. It respectfully allows those people to obtain and use birth control, and accepts that they will; it does not bar them from doing so or threaten those who do with excommunication or termination of employment or any other sanctions. What the Church’s paternalism does do is defend the rights of its members to stand for what they believe, without the government forcing them to violate their religious consciences.

Allow me to draw the paternalistic metaphor a little further. If an employer is the “parent” of its employees, obligated to care for them financially and medically, then what right is it of the government to define the parameters of that care? Certainly, a parent is obligated to provide medical care for his or her children; to fail to do so is child endangerment or neglect. But does the government demand that all parents provide birth control for their teenage children? Thankfully our civil liberties have not yet been infringed upon that far! Employees are not teenagers, but nonetheless the idea of employer healthcare reduces them to dependents, and raises employers to the role of parents and providers. And parents have their own consciences regarding what activities and procedures they will fund and provide, upon which the government has no right to infringe. And “children” have the inviolate freedom to go and seek services elsewhere.

This metaphor breaks down when one realizes that employees generally have the freedom to choose their own employers; children cannot choose their own parents. If employees expect free birth control as a benefit, they should not choose to work for a Catholic employer. For many years this has been common wisdom. Catholic employers have never provided birth control, and until now, employees have never expected them to. And the government has never demanded that they do so.

This is a new mandate, a new overreach, a new infringement upon religious liberty and conscience, a new guarantee by the government that has never been guaranteed before — and something that all people need to seriously examine before they charge the Catholic Church with “misogyny” and “sexism.” These charges are nothing but smoke that clouds and obscures the real issue. The Church and its members would just as soon object to funding sterilizations or vasectomies for men. This issue has nothing at all to do with the Church hating women, discriminating against them, or dictating the sexual lives and ethics of its members. This has everything to do with the Church standing up for the rights of its members to their religious liberties and consciences.

Why Protestants Should Care

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St. Gregory the Great

St. Gregory the Great, a Christian of the sixth century.

So, I finally revealed my blog to my Facebook and Twitter friends. And a good many of them have followed me. Being a little more public has brought about a good bit of self-scrutiny: Am I relevant? Why should anybody want to read my blog? Why should Protestants, in particular, want to read my blog?

Well, let me say up front that my aim is not to convert anybody. If my own journey in any way inspires anyone else to look into the Catholic Church for themselves, I would be gratified and humbled; but I don’t really expect that to happen.

But the first reason I would give why Protestants should read my blog is that the Roman Catholic Church is Christian, too. There’s such a tendency — particularly in the evangelical branches of the faith, as I can attest — to marginalize and ignore the modern Catholic Church as something foreign, irrelevant, and obsolete, at best — at worst as something corrupt, unbiblical, and anti-Christian. Growing up evangelical, I simply never heard about the Catholic Church. Reading even the most scholarly and thoughtful evangelical books, I never saw the Catholic Church mentioned. When I did hear it mentioned, it was usually in shades of otherness and mistrust — as a “dead religion” bound up in “empty tradition” and “works’ righteousness.” The primary thing I want to convey about my newfound faith is that this stereotype is completely false. By my witness and by my words, I hope to vividly proclaim the life and love of the Catholic faith. And, as Protestants, I hope you will welcome this message and embrace Catholics as brothers and sisters in the faith.

Not only is the Catholic Church Christian, but it is an essential part of the Christian heritage of all Protestants. The Christian faith didn’t suddenly emerge out of nothing in 1517. Whatever you may believe personally about the Catholic Church, you must acknowledge that the Roman Catholic Church received and nourished and protected the Christian faith, and its Bible, through nearly 1,500 years of history, at last bearing it into the hands of the Protestant Reformers in the sixteenth century. What happened over the course of those prior centuries? Growing up, I had little idea, and I suppose many other Protestants do not either. There is a tendency among many Protestants to reject the Catholic past, when in fact it is the Christian past. Did the faith die, or shrivel up, or disappear, over those ages? Did the Catholic Church cease to be Christian? One only need look as far as just a few of the shining examples of faith we have in the saints, to assure oneself that it did not: St. Gregory the Great (c. 540–604), St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), St. Francis of Assisi (1182–1226), St. Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556), St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897). These and many other Christians of the past can inspire and enrich your faith.

Through understanding the Christian past — where your faith has come from, how it came to you, and the people of the past who have lived and shared it — you can better understand the faith and how to live it today. Through appreciating the Catholic Church as the Mother Church of your own, rather than rejecting it as something lost and devoid, you can gain assurance of the integrity, security, and timelessness of the Christian Gospel over all the ages of history. You may even find something of value to your own faith that has been lost through all the turmoil of the Reformation and its aftermath. As an historian, a friend, and an evangelical, I hope to be able to share the history of the Church in an accessible and interesting way.

Finally, I hope you will read my blog because we are all Christians together. We all share the love of God and the Gospel of Christ. And we owe it to our Lord not to abandon His Church to the division and disunity to which our ancestors have driven it. It is the burden of each and every one of us to strive for understanding across the chasms we have made — because Christ is undivided; it is we who have brought brokenness to the earthly Church, and we who perpetuate it every day that all Christians cannot break bread together. It is my hope that through striving to understand our differences and disagreements in these pages, I will help all see that we are not that far apart, and maybe even help us to draw closer together — closer to reunification. I truly believe that it is possible, and that it is more important now than ever before that we stand together as the Body of Christ.

By Scripture Alone; Alone with Scripture

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(I am afraid this one gets a little preachy; possibly a little critical. As always, my heart is not to attack, but to rebuild.)

Gutenberg Bible

The Gutenberg Bible, the first printed Bible. (Wikipedia)

So continuing from my thoughts yesterday:

One of the most strident cries of the Protestant Reformation, and of Protestants to this day, is sola scriptura: by Scripture alone. Scripture, the Bible, was to be the sole rule and authority of faith and doctrine.

From an academic standpoint, I can respect this. It holds Christian doctrine and tradition to a very high, legalistic standard of proof. It demands that all belief and practice be absolutely attested to in inspired writing and stamped with divine approval. It demands written attestation by the Apostles — or by God Himself — before Christians put any element of faith into action. But is this a reasonable expectation?

As I wrote yesterday, nothing in our New Testament represents itself as a compendium or catechism of the Christian faith. No book claims to contain the sum of Christian truth. There is no demand or expectation in the New Testament that the New Testament writings alone should support, nourish, instruct, or guide the Church. At the time these documents were written, there wasn’t even any such collection as the New Testament. How could Paul, at the time he wrote his letters, have expected that his words, with those of a few others, would be the sole rule of the Church’s faith? Arguably, he and the other writers were aware that their writing was inspired by the Holy Spirit; but it is doubtful that they at the time would have understood their words to be Scripture — which to them referred to the Old Testament (though St. Peter in 2 Peter 3:15-16 apparently places St. Paul’s writings on the level with Scripture by the end of their lives, ca. A.D. 63–67).

It is evident throughout the New Testament that the Apostles’ primary mode of transmitting the teachings of Christ was through spoken preaching and teaching, not writing. Most of the Apostles were too busy doing other things, like evangelizing to the ends of the earth and dying martyrs for the faith, to write much. That Paul was such an effective writer as well as a tireless preacher surely had a lot to do with why Christ chose him. On every page of Paul’s epistles, he refers to what he taught to the churches in person, teachings that he does not repeat in writing. The Early Church, living prior to the New Testament being collected, received their Christian faith directly through the oral teaching of the Apostles and their successors, and could not have even comprehended an insistence on “Scripture alone.” It is a little ironic that a faith so focused on sermons and preaching should at the same time reject the oral tradition of the Apostles.

Some Protestant sects take this rejection further than others. Especially some of the older groups, such as Lutherans and Anglicans, have retained many of the external trappings of the Church’s traditions. I speak only anecdotally, I confess — I have a lot of reading to do about these churches — but I often hear Anglicanism referred to as “Catholic lite.” Many more conservative and traditional Anglicans are making the journey back to the Mother Church by the parish. I’ve never been a part of a Lutheran church, but through following Ken Ranos and talking to my friend Heather (who attends an ELCA church in California), I’m frequently nodding in agreement at all the similarities and parallels between our traditions. They take the attitude, it seems, that many of the traditions of the Church are valuable and beautiful and praiseworthy, and ought not to be discarded as long as they don’t hinder the Gospel of Christ.

Other churches, especially those descending from the Calvinist tradition, take the rejection of tradition much further. Here I’m on much more familiar ground, having been a part of Baptist and Presbyterian churches. The iconoclasm of Reformation Calvinists toward religious images is well known. It is evident to anyone who has ever seen or set foot in an evangelical church the extent to which their sects have rejected the artistic, ornamental, and architectural aspects of tradition. In doctrine, to a further point than Lutherans or Anglicans, these churches reject anything that is not written explicitly on the face of Scripture. The Sacraments of Confession and Confirmation are completely absent, for example — if not the notion of sacramentality itself. The veneration of saints, the very idea of sainthood, is gone. The attitude here, as I’ve heard from many Protestants, is that the absence of a tradition from Scripture is reason in itself not to do it.

This can, and has, been taken to extremes. The Seventh-Day Adventists and their ilk reject Sunday worship — which has been practiced by the Church since the earliest days — because it is not commanded by Scripture. The Churches of Christ reject the use of musical instruments in worship because there is no evidence of it in the New Testament. I encountered a “new wave” church in Alabama that had no pastor but professed to practice a “New Testament model of church organization.” I am not quite sure what that means, since the New Testament never lays out a model of church organization; but presumably it included elders and deacons. It is common to hear of Protestant churches that try to reconstruct the New Testament Church — but the New Testament gives only glimpses of the faith and practice of the Early Church; most evangelicals reject the authorities that would shed the most light, the Church Fathers. Some churches are even rejecting the traditional doctrine of the Trinity, and returning to such ancient heresies as Sabellianism and Arianism. I’ve talked to Protestants who readily acknowledged that some of the traditions of the Church are good things to do and hold, and have value and merit — but that their churches nonetheless reject them because they can’t find them in Scripture.

This seems to me to be an awfully lonely and barren place to be. By their strictness in living by Scripture alone, these churches are left entirely alone with Scripture. They have shorn themselves of all of the beautiful and wonderful things that have clothed and ornamented the Church over the ages: all of the history, all of the scholarship, all of the art, all of the music. They have spurned the fellowship of the heroes and martyrs, the great cloud of witnesses, who are a part of our spiritual communion in Christ. Even more seriously, they have cast away elements of the faith — the Sacraments, Holy Orders, Apostolic Succession — that make the Gospel work, that guide and nourish the Church, that protect her teachings and sacraments, and that keep her in communion with the Holy Spirit.

Most tragically, with these nuts and bolts and hinges removed, the Church has lost her unity. Since the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, the breakaway Protestant sects have split, and split, and split again, until there are estimated to be upward of 33,000 distinct Protestant denominations (and this is a conservative estimate). There have been more new denominations formed in the past century than have ever existed in all the prior centuries combined. Many churches — the hundreds of thousands of independent or nondenominational churches — really are completely alone. Only the Catholic Church remains one and coherent in the face of this disintegration. The Protestant churches beyond are splintering.

But wasn’t the Reformation supposed to restore the Church? Wasn’t sola scriptura supposed to bring the Church back to the Gospel? Whatever may be said about the doctrine’s aims, without any kind of magisterial authority to guide the Church, disagreement about the interpretation of Scripture only multiplies. Sola scriptura is the linchpin of the whole Reformation, without which it would not have been possible to reject the Catholic Church, its hierarchy, or its Sacraments. It, more than any other doctrine, is the root of our continued disagreement, and our failure to reunite the Church. And it has fostered the individualistic, private interpretation of Scripture, which to this day has been more divisive than any other element in Christian spirituality.

The Lonely Pilgrim

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And now, the unveiling:

“Catholicus nascens,” I decided, is something of a mouthful, not very communicable or catchy. I was tired of having to write down the URL for friends.

So my blog is now known as “The Lonely Pilgrim.” And I’ve assigned it (and the DNS should have propagated by now) to the domain LonelyPilgrim.com.

There should be redirects and all, so this should be pretty transparent for most folks. This post is for all one or two of my readers who might be confused at the new face.

Before St. Paul’s Tomb

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Oh, I want to go back to Rome so badly! I just watched this recent report (no new news, but new video), and it seems the Church has exposed St. Paul’s sarcophagus more fully, and pilgrims are able to go down into the confessio to pray in front of the tomb.

(Previously: The Eternal City)

Also, expect another very cool update along these lines (relics of apostles and martyrs) very soon! I’m struggling through this last paper.

And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up. —Galatians 6:9 (ESV)

What is “Evangelical”?

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I fear I’m really wandering off my topic here, but maybe I can tie this back in somehow. In my continued reading about Protestant theology, I’ve really been struggling with the definition of the term “evangelical.” This seems relevant to understanding where I’ve come from and consequently who and where I am now.

Certainly the word evangelical itself, taken to its roots, has a pretty basic meaning. It originates from the Greek εὐαγγέλιον (evangelion), which stems from ευ (“good”) + ἀγγέλλω (“bear news”). The εὐαγγέλιον is the message being borne, the “good news” — in Christian usage, the Gospel of Christ. An evangelist is someone who bears the Gospel, and in Catholic circles usually refers to the four authors of the biblical Gospels, Ss. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. So evangelical literally means “of, pertaining to, or conveying good news (the gospel).”

So, according to that definition, it would seem that all Christianity is evangelical. But that’s not the way the word is used in our culture. “Evangelical” is a label that, especially in the U.S. South, seems to encompass the majority of Protestants, especially where I’m coming from: Baptists, Pentecostals, and most non-denominational Christians. The churches that seemed to be excluded were more “high church” denominations, such as Catholics, Episcopals (Anglicans), and possibly Methodists.

So what is “evangelical”? Do these “evangelical” churches bear any more “good news” than anybody else? How was this word being used? I reckoned in some of my reading that people were using “evangelical” Protestantism as simply the opposite of “mainline” Protestantism. But “mainline” is just as amorphous and undescriptive as “evangelical.” What is it that qualitatively defines “evangelicalism”?

Naturally, I turned to the font of all knowledge, Wikipedia, which provided a very capable and informative article on evangelicalism, and even better, linked me to an authoritative source: a report from the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals on “Defining Evangelicalism.” According to the document:

In the English-speaking world . . . the modern term usually describes the religious movements and denominations which sprung forth from a series of revivals that swept the North Atlantic Anglo-American world in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Key figures associated with these revivals included the itinerant English evangelist George Whitefield (1715-1770); the founder of Methodism, John Wesley (1703-1791); and American philosopher and theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). These revivals were particularly responsible for the rise of the Baptists and Methodists from obscure sects to their traditional position as America’s two largest Protestant denominational families.

This is toward the definition I was inclined toward as an American historian: that brand of Christianity that first emerged out of the First and Second Great Awakening, in contrast to the dominant Puritanism and Anglicanism of the day. So what, qualitatively, defines evangelicalism? The document above, citing historian David Bebbington, defines four characteristics:

  1. The need for personal conversion experiences (or being “born again”)
  2. The centrality of the Bible as the authoritative, written Word of God
  3. An emphasis on Christ’s sacrificial death and resurrection as the way to salvation
  4. An imperative toward active, outgoing evangelism through the Gospel

Reading this, my initial reaction is, “No duh.” All four of these seem no-brainers to me, the sine quas non that define Christianity to my as-yet evangelical brain. Until coming to the Catholic Church, I had never been a part of a church that didn’t adhere to these four tenets. Without any one of these, a church of my evangelical youth would have seemed to be lacking something essential. These certainly provide a good, sturdy definition.

I still don’t know who is evangelical. And asking, “Is your church evangelical?” hasn’t so far gotten the response I’m looking for. I asked a Reformed friend and fellow classicist, and he responded, “Of course we believe in the Gospel!” How do people “get saved” in different churches? The presence of a personal conversion experience seems to be the most visible mark of evangelicalism. Southern Baptists are evangelical; Pentecostals are evangelical; what about Methodists? I know historically, Methodists have been evangelical — but according to the wiki, United Methodists are considered mainline. Now, what the heck is “mainline,” besides “not evangelical”? This again, seems a term searching for a definition.

Charles Colson’s “Ecumenism of the Trenches”

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Charles Colson

Charles Colson (1931-2012)

This morning in the National Catholic Register, I was saddened to learn of the death of Charles Colson a few days ago. (The NCRegister piece is moving and worth reading.)

Even in the far orbit of the evangelical sphere I’ve been in for so many years, I knew and admired Chuck Colson. He was one of the most vivid examples in our society of the radical, life-changing, revolutionizing power of the Gospel of Christ. Once Richard Nixon’s “hatchet man,” known for his political ruthlessness, and implicated in the Watergate scandal, Colson gave his life to Christ after reading C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. After a term in prison, he devoted the rest of his life to Christian service and advocacy.

A few months ago, in one of my many thrifting runs and book hunts, I picked up a copy of Evangelicals and Catholics Together: Toward a Common Mission, a collection of essays edited by Colson and his friend Fr. Richard J. Neuhaus (who, I see, was also a convert, a former Lutheran pastor). The message of the ecumenical document they together helped draft: that in the face of the challenges of the modern world, Catholics and evangelicals should stand together as witnesses.

I applaud these efforts. Now more than ever, we Christians should strive for cooperation and understanding if not unity. It is my hope that through my conversion and witness, I can reach out especially to my evangelical brothers and sisters to dispel mistaken ideas about Catholics and foster a spirit of acceptance and accord.

Requiescat in pace, Charles Colson. May God guide you to your reward.

What was I before?

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I’ve been doing some reading lately. Feeling slightly ashamed, I used to admit to my Catholic friends that I was reading a Protestant book, but I don’t anymore. No one has ever said anything. Whether a book is Catholic or Protestant has little bearing on its read-worthiness; both Catholics and Protestants have worthy things to say about God.

Belatedly (posthumously?), I’ve been boning up on my Protestant theology. When I was a Protestant, I had little understanding of theology, and little patience for its uncertainty — with all of the voices disagreeing, interpreting Scripture differently, how could I possibly find the truth in that muddle? But now that I’ve found an absolute certainty in the authority of the Church and Magisterium — now that I have a firm foundation on which to base what I believe — then I am better able to comprehend and consider the ideas of others. It’s ironic that the very cornerstone of the Reformation, sola scriptura, the Reformers’ very attempt to find a bedrock of authority, proved to be my greatest stumbling block.

My theological underpinning was never strong to begin with. Growing up, I never had any formal catechesis on Christian doctrine or theology. What I knew, I knew by osmosis, more from the culture around me than from any teaching or preaching: Jesus died to forgive our sins that we might have eternal life. Beyond that basic truth was muddiness. I had heard of Martin Luther as the heroic Reformer, and of John Calvin as “that guy who believed in predestination, and we don’t believe in that” — but we didn’t seem to be following in either of those traditions. Who were we? Where did we come from?

It wasn’t until late in high school, when we reading The Scarlet Letter, that I first learned the differences between Calvinism* and Arminianism. And I realized that we at Calvary were essentially Arminian, a term I had never heard before. Predestination (election), grace, and human nature just weren’t talked about at my church, ever. In my thinking, our salvation depended on us, on our choosing to follow God in faith. God wasn’t compelling us by His grace, snatching us up against our will, or damning others to the fires of hell. Neither was He denying that we had free will at all. And we could certainly backslide and walk away from God. I had this crude, misshapen conception of Reformed theology for years.

* Some of my Reformed friends have taken exception to the term “Calvinism,” preferring instead “Reformed” theology or even simply “doctrines of grace.” I use the term “Calvinism” both out of grammatical expediency and an aim for doctrinal clarity, to refer to those doctrines taught by, in line with, or in the tradition of John Calvin and his followers, and not to convey any negative connotation. Because there is more than one “Reformed” tradition, and more than one understanding of the “doctrines of grace.” I’m talking about the Calvinist one.

As I grew older and attempted to educate myself more, I became more and more frustrated by theological confusion and my lack of foundation. And I eventually decided that it didn’t really matter anyway, that God loved us all no matter what we believed about Him, that there was no way to find the truth in all the mess. It was a position of thoroughgoing ecumenism, or worse, doctrinal agnosticism. I have met so many Christians at this same point, eschewing labels and denominations and formal doctrine in favor of terms like “nondenominational Christian,” “mere Christian” (I preferred that one, after C.S. Lewis — but Lewis never intended in that book that anyone should remain a “mere Christian”), or “Jesus follower.”

But the more I read, the more I see that labels and denominations and doctrines do matter. In one sense I believe I was right, and still maintain, that all orthodox believers are followers of Christ and should strive to find our common ground rather than be continually divisive in our disunity. But in another, what we believe about God and about salvation profoundly affects how we view God and ourselves and our relationship to Him, how we view the world around us, how we view our neighbor and our mission as Christians on this earth. Just looking around to what different Christians do attests to this. Some emphasize world missions, devoting money and time to spreading the Gospel and ministering to the needs of regions of our world stricken with poverty, disease, and strife. Others are more focused on caring for the needy in their own back yard. Some are ardently evangelical, canvassing cities with tracts and distributing Bibles, warning of the immediacy of death apart from salvation. Others are more reflective and calculated in their evangelism and outreach, preferring their lives and their works to be their witnesses. Still others, perhaps the majority, don’t do anything at all. It’s not so much about labels as about lifestyle.

I never thought much until recently about the differences between how Christians view the Christian life and Christian piety. In my Pentecostal upbringing, as I’ve written, the focus was on the miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit, and on personal piety, Bible study and “quiet times” of private devotion. Other Christians around me just didn’t seem to care about that, and I must confess, I wondered, especially when I was younger, if they were “bad” Christians, if they didn’t care about God or their relationship to Him. But no — the book I’m reading pointed out that this understanding of a personal, private relationship with God is essentially an evangelical one — that some Christians, especially Reformed (as the book is treating), but just as well Catholics, see the heart of Christian life in public professions of faith, in liturgy and the Sacraments, and most of all in service. That doesn’t diminish the importance of personal piety and personal faith at all — but it’s what we do in the light that makes us Christians (John 3:19-21).

I’ve always struggled with the terms “evangelical” and “fundamentalist.” So do a lot of people; there have been whole books written on the difference. I am not convinced the distinction is really very helpful: most evangelical Christians believe the “fundamentals,” and most fundamentalists are evangelical in outlook or piety; the difference, especially to the secular world, often seems to be one of the degree of fervency or severity, and especially the latter label is often used pejoratively. It seems clear (I now realize fully for the first time) that Reformed (Calvinist) Christians are not evangelicals. And it also seems clear to me that I as a Protestant was an evangelical, because of the emphasis on a personal conversion experience and personal relationship with God, and a Charismatic and a Pentecostal (the latter is a subset of the former), because of the emphasis on miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit. And, I would argue, because of the emphasis on personal, emotional experiences of God, on sensation and feeling over reason and doctrine.

A friend of mine, a convert to Orthodox Christianity, shared something while I was converting that I didn’t really understand until I reached this point. She wrote that her identity as an Orthodox Christian doesn’t erase or overwrite her identity as a Protestant or evangelical, but that deep down she will always have that and be that. I feel that about myself, too, as a Catholic. In converting, I didn’t cease to be something I was, but became something more. The butterfly still has the genes of the caterpillar. Though my feelings toward the faith of my youth are often ambivalent, I have taken many things from it that I will always carry with me as a Christian, that I believe are good things: devotion to private prayer and Bible study, a commitment to regular tithing of my income, and love for praise and worship music. So no, reflection on Protestant things is not “posthumous” at all or even retrospective. I am sure there are many other fruits of my Protestant identity that will continue to come to light.

Emotion and the Leap of Faith

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I wondered if receiving the Real Presence would feel any different than any other time I’d taken Communion in my life.

Eucharistic adoration

I wondered if the Sacrament of Confirmation would evince any inward or outward change in me — if I would feel that, too.

Through the years of confusion I experienced as a Pentecostal, I learned to be very distrustful of my emotions. If I feel a sensation, I wondered, can I rightly ascribe it to God? By what justification? How do I know it’s God, and not my own self-stimulation? Because I know well how easy it is to drive myself to feel, even to believe, things that I dearly want to feel and believe. How do I know if it’s real?

It all, of course, comes down to faith. What can be observed empirically and proven objectively about God never quite reaches all the way across the chasm of unbelief. There has to be a leap of faith* — and I’m pretty sure this is by design. No matter how much God reveals about Himself, He always leaves that ever-so-slight gap, foiling any attempt at absolute proof. Because of what value would faith be if everything about God could be explained and proven — if the existence of God and the truth of Christ were as certain as the physics of the sun and the moon? How could believers be a people set apart if every scientist and every joe on the street had to believe, however grudgingly, or if God were as obvious and as commonplace as Barack Obama? How could we trust God with faith like a child if we could pin Him to a specimen board and probe Him with all our powers of scientific observation?

(* I am told Kierkegaard wrote about this “leap of faith” and in fact coined the phrase, but I’m not much of a philosopher and haven’t read Kierkegaard — though I’d like to.)

And this is where, I think, there’s room for experience and emotion — especially for people like me who experience strong emotions. I cannot found my faith on emotion — this for years has been my greatest fear: to build my faith on the shifting sand of emotion, and to have it all collapse out from under me yet again. But if emotion, deep feeling, sensibility to the stirrings of the heart, is a gift that I’ve been given — can it not be another set of eyes, one more lens to edge me yet a little closer across that chasm?

I also have a rational brain and acute intellectual tools — but these are faculties I’ve had to build and cultivate and train; my natural inclination is to follow my heart. I have had to discipline my heart and my mind; temper my strong emotions with the moderation of reason. I hear so many reactionary Christians lash out against academia and education in fear and anger — but this is what the academy has done for me: not destroyed my faith, but given me the implements to build a sturdier and more secure foundation for God to base my faith on. My faith is stronger and more unshakable, by worlds, than at any moment of the fervency of my youth; and paradoxically, by equal measure, it’s also more passionate and deeply felt. When I believe with my reason that the object of my faith is real, then I am free to feel with my heart all the love and joy and peace with which I have been blessed. When my faith is founded upon what I know and can observe and can reason, then emotion becomes the beautiful and glorious ornament built on top that reaches even higher: all of my most soaring effluences of feeling become exultant spires raising to the heavens.

So did it feel different? Yes, it did! I went back to my pew, ruminating on what had just happened: I had just consumed, taken into my body, the true, real, physical Body and Blood of my Redeemer. I had joined my flesh to His flesh and my spirit to His Spirit; I had communed in His very elements; I had been touched by God. And it felt like the most intimate thing I had ever experienced. The most beautiful, most precious feeling I had ever felt: a feeling of total love and absolute acceptance.

Holy Spirit as Dove

And my Confirmation: “Be sealed with the Gift of the Holy Spirit,” Father Joe spoke. The Sign of the Cross on my forehead: the oil of chrism marking me as Christ’s for all eternity. It was the sweetest smell I had ever smelled in my life; I didn’t want to wash my face that night, but even after I did, I could still smell it. I could still feel the mark there; I still can. It felt like the most precious kiss of heaven: a sign, both temporal and eternal, of love and belonging and protection; a brand identifying me as Christ’s and binding me to His Church, a member of His flock for all time. Now, I believe I have known the Holy Spirit for quite some time: but this most certainly marked a fresh and special outpouring; a total immersion in His grace. And I feel like a completely different person.